Self-Reconfiguring Robots

Posted 7 Oct 2002 at 13:54 UTC by steve

Wired has posted a new article on the topic self-reconfiguring robots. It covers the basic concept of self-reconfiguring robots and the current state of the art. The article focuses primarily on macro-scale reconfiguration (e.g. transformer-style combinations of several robots) but does touch on the idea of nano and atomic scale reconfiguration.

Morphing robots, posted 7 Oct 2002 at 20:31 UTC by motters » (Master)

A fascinating concept. If you could build a molecule robot the size of a matchbox some interesting things might be possible. I bet all that moving about is quite inefficient and consumes a lot of energy though.

- Bob

the problems with these are..., posted 7 Oct 2002 at 23:38 UTC by nevyn » (Journeyer)

...quite simply, it's often hard enough to program one bot to work or a cluster of them to work loosely together. This seems an even greater nightmare! I've been following the progress of this concept for a few years now and, although the modules are coming on in leaps and bounds (some of them will even self connect if placed near each other on the table), they all seem to be pretty much hand built and hand coded to do a task.

Role on ditributed, evolving systems :)

Hate to be contrary, posted 13 Oct 2002 at 11:18 UTC by ROB.T. » (Master)

Cool concept, but I can't think of an application for a robot that morphs that can't be done by a robot with some interchangable tools. Besides hauling around any extra DOFs seems inefficient.

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